Why is Veeky Forums in love with the liches? Specifically...

Why is Veeky Forums in love with the liches? Specifically, the "super genius lives forever with no drawbacks thanks to being so smart, non-evil thanks to necromancy being perfectly neutral and only being hated by close-minded bigots in my setting" kind?
Are liches just self-inserts?

Because they're the vigin NEETs of the Undead world.

>Reminder according to the monster manual, Death Knights regard Liches as "lesser undead" and routinely dominate them as slaves

Virgin Lich & Chad DK

Do they give those nerds swirlies?

>Lesser undead
>Have a higher CR than Death Knights
Really gets the noggin a joggin

The Virgin Lich
>Went through decades of study and dark bargains to gain his powers
>Hides is soul in his favorite childhood toy
>Constantly sends his minions to attack adventurers
>Tries impressing vampire countesses with his power
>Lives in an old, dilapidated tower by himself
>Meticulously plans his spells every day for any kind of encounter; no one ever attacks his tower though
>is just a dusty skeleton in wizard robes

The Chad Death Knight
>Has all the Lich's powers and then some just from killing his wife
>Uses Command Undead on slutty vampire chicks
>Lives in posh gothic castle which doubles as his soul jar
>Never attacks or acknowledges adventurers at all, his legend is all he needs to get them to attack him
>Perfectly-toned bonemass underneath masterwork armor
>Does not ever prepare or plan for encounters, TPKs every party he meets
>Has a Lich slaving away in his library, which he does not use.

Because you get to be a badass and rule over a bunch of minions, but at the same time you don't really need any social skills because you're minions are all undead and you're basically by yourself in your little undead kingdom. In other words, pretty much what said.

Weird. Don't see any reference to liches here

The joke comes from the 3rd Edition monster manual.

It doesn't explicitly state liches are servants of death knights. It's just one ambiguously-worded passage which implies that. But it's funny so every now and then Veeky Forums rolls with it.

I mean there's a fairly long tradition of Veeky Forums liking to turn tropes on their heads.

Things like "good necromancy" / "culture that doesn't think necromancy is icky" crops up every so often.

And Liches are so often a traditional big bad, that making one who is an okay guy is funny.

Uh, I don't think that's a thing. Most people on tg dislike 'good liches' and 'good necromancer' threads usually get ridiculed.

Remember Deep Rot.

I don't think most of this is an actual thing. Veeky Forums in general loves undead and particularly skeleton looking ones. Guess it's because the offer a good mix of memes and more serious approaches.

Many of us are ForeverGMs and at some point going cartoonishly-evil-skeleton-wizard goes from being cliche to refreshing. It's like a "save the princess" quest. We all saved Zelda, but an honest to goodness unapologetic "lets kick ____'s ass and get the girl" is pretty fun, and i rarely see DMs to them.

Keep It Simple Stupid is a great worldbuilding motto if you are like me and have to rein in the loredumping the players cant reasonably be expected to memorize. It's D&D, most people dont expect Italian city-state tier intrigue.

We never get to lick, so we liche

That's even more funny, because Death Knights tend to arise spontaneously. The people who become Death Knights don't really have to study for it, they just have to do something really awful.

A Lich's story is "I studied for years to become a Lich." A Death Knight's story is "So I fucked this elf maiden, and my Lord told you - 'If you keep fucking this girl, you're going to go to hell.' And I said 'God himself could not stop me from putting my dick into her' then shit went downhill from there."

>The joke comes from the 2nd Edition monster manual.
You tried

Because they are as mediocre and shitty as liches are, and see themselves in these loser fucks whose skill is middling along but their age is catching up with them.

That and the fact they only take the barest idea of what a lich is without all its actual lore and implications and try to be cool and edgy and mature.

Liches get bitches to put stitches in their britches.

>"culture that doesn't think necromancy is icky"
The big question with those is always "why aren't they living post-scarcity if necromancy is so cool"

yes

Because they can only breed so quickly, can only die so quickly, and can only turn the dead into servants so quickly. They just lack the ability to increase their workforce to keep up with population demand.
At least not without calling for a tithe of subject nation's dead.

Because paladin hippies

It's pretty much just a magical version of the mob boss fantasy that everyone has.

Remember that 2e Death Knights had to sing about their curse every full moon.

I never had one. I did fantasize about being a police chief, though. Also, the pope.

>nigga death knight raps about his evil doings
>turns into prolific musician

>Non-evil liches
>Obtain immortality so they can spend multiple lifetimes trying to achieve some goal of research or otherwise to make the world a better place
>Hey y do u like this??

it could have a religious aproach to necromancy, so economical interests in the practice are seen as heresy.

Sounds like Dr. Doom.

Because
>SKELETONS, LOL!
>I MADE A BONE PUN, DID YOU LIKE IT?
>TOO SMART FOR FLESH!
>ALL DA MAGIC.
It's just memeshit. No Veeky Forums poster I've ever played with has ever been a lich, even the ones who bothered to play wizards. Heads up, most of you play fighters, paladins, and rogues.

>No Veeky Forums poster I've ever played with has ever been a lich,

Well obviously, the magic in our world does not allow for walking talking skeletons.

Yet.

Speak for yourself bitch I played a Ratfolk lich, games still going strong.

I'm sorry.
>has ever played a character that was a lich

ignored my lecture to make this

Because the corrupted, damned, sad and miserable lich that expends its existence without purpose roaming and cursing everything on their wake is just pitiful, if terrifying.

Because they're immortal and have all the time in the world to do whatever they want, without the everyday flaws of being living. A sort of perfect fantasy otaku/neet.

it provides one of the easiest and and best "bases" to build an adventure around

evil, very powerful boss with very clear motivations - check.
mindless evil mooks (the undead at the liches disposal) - check
dungeon for dungeon crawl (for phylectary or other object of similar importance) - understandable that he would have.

it's also very, very easy to add and detract from this "base", maybe he has additional motivations, totally justified since he's intelligent and has had a very long time to live, he can also have personality since he is/was an induvidual, but still no matter how much you add to it will remain a villian, since lich.
undead got massive amounts of flavour and is able to be used in a lot of fun and interesting ways, everything from simple hordes of enemies to slapped together undead abominations, to zombified monsters.
the dungeons can be filled with lots of wacky, nefarious shit, why? because unlimited time to prepare shit to guard something very precious.

I like neutral Liches, not so much good Liches. These are individuals so far removed from the rest of the world and so focus in their research that they long abandon whatever impulses or personality traits that made they evil.

> cursing everything on their wake
Now, are proper curses/curseflingers common? I think they are kind of rare
Remember that little fat piece of crap that caused The Nameless One to hiccup?

I like liches. But I might like worm that walks even more.
Can't really decide which I like more at the moment.

Until one nation decides to do it then everyone has to keep up

Here is a picture of the flying necrobarge of the necromantic empire )

it's an Acquired taste

Lich King as in Arthas is not actually a Lich. He is a Death Knight

I approve.

Well the way I run liches is as ancient, powerful wizards who are almost always evil (since the ritual required is 'unspeakably evil') but are usually too busy with 'muh magic' to hardcore try to fuck shit up. Usually. Also the drawback is that if you kill their phylactery they die instantly.

He is a Death Lich Knight King

Hahahaha.

Worthless knight.

What in the hells is that?

You know how liches eat human souls to stay around?

That’s an akalich, they use god souls.

Yep.

Arthas is a death knight wearing the Lich King's phylactery

I love immortal wizards, but I’m not a fan of Liches. I like every wizard to have invented their own method of immortality which they jealously guard the secret to.

To put it in numbers...

Virgin death knight
>cr +3

Chad akalich
>cr +40

>Liches require soul tendies to exist
>The superior Death Knight simply haunts the realm for eternity, not requiring any sustenance

Akaliches don’t actually need to eat god souls.

They just do because god souls let them skip the week long reform cycle, and why not?

His only drawback is that he has to sing whenever there’s a full moon.
So he’s Chad as fuck, doesn’t have to work for his powers, and is a fucking opera singer.

>Akaliches have their own version of Good Boy Points they use to bypass a weakness Death Knights don't have in the first place

Pretyt much, yeah. they're "super powerful" and "unkillable" and they're "wizards" so that supposedly makes them invicible casters. And that makes Veeky Forums love them.

>eating gods
>good boy points
Yea sure

Plus death knights are akalich lackies, they have command undead at will and death knights aren’t cool enough to bypass it.

>death knight becomes a disney princess every full moon

I'm okay with this.

The moon glows soft on the castle tonight
Not a whisper to be heard
Only the Lich's sobbing
And really who cares about that nerd?

The bones are rattling
Like this swirling storm inside
Couldn't keep it in,
Pelor knows I've tried

Don't let them in, don't let them see
Be the brave knight you always had to be
No drugs no sex, no rock and rollllllllll
Well now they knoooowwwwwww

Let them burn, let them burn!
Won't hold it back anymore!
Let them burn, let them burn!
An karanir thanagoorrrrr!

Here I stand, and here I stay,
Adventurers coooooome!

Heroes never bothered me anyway.

You've never been with a lich player because 9 out of 10 DMs want nothing to do with custom races with snowflake rules, and a lich's level requirements are too tremendous for a normal leveled campaign. It does absolutely blow that we don't have a playable skeleton core race in 2017. I'd have made some PC skeleton race years before I'd have ever added god damned Dragonborn.

Jack Skellington vs. Oogie Boogie

The orc shaman was a much more interesting lich king and general antagonist than Arthas.

>third party shit

user, I...

How many god souls are you realistically going to come across, anyways? Any time a god actually dies, it's pretty much a world-maiming calamity in most settings.

You can become a lesser god by killing 20 balors.

They really don’t use them that much anyways.

This is from the +mmortals +andbook, a third-party supplement about becoming orders of magnitude more powerful than overgods.

It has a lot of cool ideas, but most of them haven't been thought through very well.

As said they
>don’t need them to survive
>only have like 4 when you find them.

Considering how many demigods can be around, and how rare Akaliches are it works.

Look at Ahmonkhet. They have mummies do all the work for them

>non-evil thanks to necromancy being perfectly neutral and only being hated by close-minded bigots in my setting

I know you're just being antagonizing, but I do genuinely really hate how fucking popular, "No-consequence Necromancy" is on Veeky Forums.
I think Necromancy is really cool and neat and I like making neutral "trying to do good" Necromancy, but I want there to be consequences and draw backs and repercussions. Especially when nobody has a problem writing in repercussions for Warlocks because 'demons'.

Demons are always evil of some form, the negative energy plane is TN leaning to NE.

So it’s an elemental plane

Magic is handled badly by D&D in general, it's too consequence free. Any significant feats of magic should require sacrifice and danger, not an infinitely replenishable resource.

You know what. Fuck this. Everybody uses the same 3 or 4 undead monsters.

How about something different. Like a lich that uses donated organs as phylacteries for example.

I don't understand why can't you become immortal while being alive in fantasy setting.
Why just don't turn yourself in some sort of Dragon or Dragonid and live forever too just in a body that is alive.

We can create our own speshul monsters, like revenants. They are like liches, but instead of a phylactery they have a quest. Once done (or impossible to accomplish) they are banished and their bodies crumble.

>Why is Veeky Forums in love with the liches?
That's a good question.

>Specifically, the "super genius lives forever with no drawbacks thanks to being so smart, non-evil thanks to necromancy being perfectly neutral and only being hated by close-minded bigots in my setting" kind?
Yeah, I can't think of any time that's ever been done well.

>Are liches just self-inserts?
Yeah that must be it.
There's no other possible explanation.

>bone puns
>skeletor
>necromancy being radical

I can think of a few.

It's absurd power level wank but I kinda like it.

>>bone puns
>>skeletor
>>necromancy being radical
>I can think of a few.
This.

It's this. Granted, I think memes like "doot doot" and "spoopy" are overdone garbage, but I fucking love Skeletor and bone puns.

The most powerful wizards in D&D are practically immortal without the need to convert to lichdom.

It's just one kind of immortality. Not all Liches are undead anyway. Though it's classic.

Pottery

>When the 5enigger arguing with the other 5eniggers who mix their shitty Warcraft Lore with 5enigger D&D on Lichlore they know nothing about.

Here's how it actually goes-
>Death Knight of Krynn (3.5)
The gods decided a brilliant way of punishing you would be to make you an undead Anti-mage monster capable of shutting down spellcasters, attracting an army, popping down Power words and ignoring AC, and an additional abiltiy that sets you apart from the others NOT made by gods.
>World of Warcraft Liches- Literally can become one in under 15 minutes RIGHT AFTER BEING TORTURED ALIVE AND THROWN INTO A SLIME THAT HAS HALF-DIGESTED YOU, and is not instrinsically undead in the sense of Negative energy, but a massive cosmic loophole to do with your racial heritage to titans, ability to actual feel, and only has the weakness of being subject to mind affecting attacks, but is at least resistant to it, as to make up for it later- per WoW D20 RPG
>World of Warcraft Death Knight- (I think the Wow Death Knights were 3rd generation) Is literally an entire profession, and you're not even Outright Undead as one- but that can happen later based on how you play your cards, great community of likeminded individuals to work with, multiple disclipines of your work, and many of the bonkers benefits of WoW unique undead- by d20 standards is Base D&D Death Knight + A PrC
>D&D 2e-3.5 (General) Lich
Lichspells, Lich power Rituals, Salient abilities, Demilichdom plus it's 4 (Fuck the universe powers) it gets when it becomes one (Contact any evil outsider, control weather, 100 clones of you prelichdom and possess a headless corpse), varied applications of Lichdom sometimes giving variant demilichdom to boot
>Death Knight of Demgorgon
Bottom bitch, losers and understatted, you lack what the Death Knight of Krynn had, and literally got tentacle fucked to get where you are today, and are dumb enough to have a sword phylactery, then Orcus and everyone else stole the schematics to your creation

>undead which looks like a weak scrawny Frankenstein's monster made of different parts
>initially had with well-preserved, almost alive body
>finds sick people on the verge of dying from faulty organs
>makes deals with them to exchange faulty living organ for his own counterpart, undead but perfectly working due to magic
>sick person survives with undead implant, but it makes them slightly shittier as a person
>in addition to that, undead monster can claim one single organ of any person it contracted, instantly exchanging selected body part with his own, no matter the distance
>unless you manage to suddenly destroy the monster suddenly, it is going to keep repairing damaged parts with better replacements from contracts it gathered over the years
>in addition, some random peasants miles away are suddenly getting pierced kidneys and hacked off stumps instead of their own ones

The Warcraft RPG isn't canon, user. Blizzard did away with it.

>Not all Liches are undead anyway
What are you on?

It was the staple of what they palnned to do when they were in the early stages of WoW, back when Death Knights, Necromancers, the FULL emerald dream and the older Outland were to come packaged with the game- Lore-wise, much of the content has been retconned or reworked, but it's the best current frame of reference for some choice subjects, namely things such as the Undead, and Arthas as the ACTUAL Lich King- opposed to them having Arthas shoot himself in the foot twice then deluding himself into thinking he became the Lich King when they actually made it so that he actually ruined the entire point of him putting on the Helm of domination.

Point is though, Death Knights aren't actually Undead Outright, they're their creators chosen- under Mind Control- something the Undead in WoW aren't immune to, because that's how Ner'zhul controls them via his Psychic imprinting/might/Cult of the Danmed potion based brainwashing, barring a few select examples like the lowest ranking "too dumb/mindless for it" undead- as I should note, Undead are made via plague and the addition of mutations to boot, such as Abominations actually being constructs despite given appearances.

Darian Morgraine in legion is the most recent example of this- you actualy bring him back as a proper undead after you fail to secure Tyrion Fordrings remains- and the same thing happened to his father- the Undead being Mindless-life hating killers is NOT a fact in Warcraft, Undeath is closer to a malleable state closer to beign titanforged because living people on Azeroth are Ex-Robot-mutants, and Zombies by technicality are- in function robots- and the thing animating is non-deascript dark magic adapted from Dreadlord rituals used in the first war- Darian's Father for example, was brainwashed by Kel'thusad.

And the guy who made Paladins is a Forsaken now- so yeah
The core functionality of a Lich- Immortality through soulbound material objects exists in non-undead also user.

Thank you for your sacrifice user

>The core functionality of a Lich- Immortality through soulbound material objects exists in non-undead also user.

The core functionality of a lich is being a powerful undead spellcaster. I've seen more things with "liches" who don't have phylacteries than "liches" who aren't undead. The only exception that comes to mind is Mage: The Awakening, where liches are not undead but don't have phylacteries either (they just eat souls or something), so it's moot.

Well- fuck, sorry, I keep forgetting about that bit. Well, more abstract sense would be Undead/Undead-like Spellcaster prologning their life through unnatural means

Nu-Veeky Forums has decided to be contrarian by sticking to tropes. It's baffling.

Bigger question: why don't these societies have Rome-style unemployment problems? Only worse, because undead, unlike slaves, make ideal soldiers too.

Why not use the undead as beasts of burden and primitive machinery? You'll stlill need workers and peasants but their labour will not be so back-breaking.

Why not use them for anything and everything you can?

Yes, because having animated dead flesh falling off in people's gardens is a good idea.

Where do you think you get these undead from, hmm? A skeleton or a zombie might last forever when it's sitting around a dungeon for centuries, but not if it's working 24 hours a day in the mines...

Unemployment in a nation with entirely free simple labor wouldn't necessarily be an issue, there's welfare programs and mindless undead can't practice professions and crafts.

"B.. But... You can't kill my because of my phylactery."
>Can still be captured.
>Can still be tortuted.
>Can be buried alive for all eternity
>Limited by corporeal form and will be rejected by any society they want to integrate with.
>Look like corpses
>Have to use doors

Ghosts/Spirits are far superior.
>Can do whatever you want, go wherever you please
>Still look like you did when you were alive
>Nobody can kill you or harm you.
>Can go and chill with people if you want to
>More spooky
>Don't need to use doors

Liches are low tier undead.

Because mindless undead are mindless. thye can only do the same exact thing over and over and over again. the only person who can control them is their creator - because if he isn't controlling them, they don't just stand there, they fucking EAT PEOPLE.